In Vivo
by Narroch
Summary: "I wonder... did my grandfather ever hold you like this?" Very dark MurakixTsuzuki


**AN: **I generally stay out of dead fandoms because I am a self-serving egoist and I like the instant gratification of reviews too much to be bothered, but… Are the rumors true? Is Descendants of Darkness truly, finally, coming off of its hiatus! I am skeptical, but open to the idea.

This fic is the result of me trying to dig myself a tunnel through some horrendous writer's block I had a really long time ago. I figured I should finish all the half written stuff I have languishing on my hard drive since I actually have something resembling free time in my life. And thus, here we are with me in a dead fandom. Perhaps it's only comatose?

I was really sketchy on sticking to canon, but since we don't really know all that much to begin with (and I haven't seen/read it in a while), I am allowed to play connect the dots. I apologize for my pretentiousness. ^^;

**Fair warning**: This contains very graphically described **gore** and **non-con** so faint of heart, and weak of stomach, beware.

Also, NO BETA. Fuckin' commas…

_In Vivo_

The air was cold, enough so that Muraki could see the translucent puffs of breath rising from the figure draped across the examination table. He stepped closer, a small strange smile pulling at the edges of his lips, one that masked his true feelings rather than expressed them. It was a common sight for him, misdirection being one of his most valuable tools; though at that moment his smile might have been genuine. His goal, his obsession, his _key_ was lying there before him and the dé-jà vu was strong enough that it was like he was looking at the world through the filmy grain of one of his grandfather's old photographs.

His grandfather's patient, _his_ patient, had finally returned to continue the treatment that had been started eighty years earlier.

_Tsuzuki_

Besides the small visible breaths, there was no indication that the man was even alive. His body was limp and pale, lips and fingers tinged blue from the cold of the room while his eyes remained slightly open, rimmed like a corpse who had died wide-eyed as rigor mortis set in. But Muraki knew better, he recognized the coma-like condition from his grandfather's notes and he relished the blank tarnished gaze, took delight in the grim implications. Tsuzuki, the proud Shinigami, ruler of the Twelve Beasts, right-hand man for the Ministry of Hades itself, was a helpless slave to his own psyche.

Tsuzuki's Ego, which had been nursing on a fabricated reality, had been shattered by the recent traumatic events; and the remaining pieces were instinctively cringing away from the pain with Id-like sensibility. Tsuzuki was trying to run away, though from what specifically, Muraki still didn't know. He doubted it was his own presence that affected Tsuzuki; possibly the memories of his grandfather's experimentation, but most likely, Tsuzuki was trying to escape _himself_.

Trying to black out the guilt.

A sad, laughable attempt; finding it impossible to run away from his own shadow, Tsuzuki's vulnerable mind crouched in the dark of a coma instead, covered his eyes with a blank stare so he wouldn't have to face the truth of his own monstrosity. To Muraki, the weak-willed ploy was almost cute.

At the edge of the sanitized table Muraki pulled out a syringe, stroking it lovingly before gently sliding it into the crook of his patient's arm. There was no response, no indication that Tsuzuki felt the sting of the needle or the slow burning of the potent drug that was pushed into his veins. The stillness only caused Muraki's smile to pull back a little further, coyly revealing a thin glint of teeth.

"Do you know why I became a doctor, Tsuzuki?" Muraki murmured, leaning down to stroke his patient's raven hair; he received no answer but plodded on regardless.

"At first, it was my own small attempt to overcome tragedy; to try and make sense of this world." He sighed, cupping the prone man's cheek as he whispered.

"When my mother was taken from me, as well as my hope for revenge, I was lost. The doll without his collector; I was destined to sit on the shelf and gather dust until I died alone." Muraki paused, as if waiting to hear Tsuzuki's thoughts on his admission. He was met with only the sound of distant whirring machines.

"But such a fate would have just been too tragic. Meaningless. So I had to give myself a new purpose, make myself worth more than a pretty china face. I became a doctor, someone who saved lives; someone who knew how to make the pain go away, if not for myself, then for others at least…" Muraki, who had been complacently tracing the lines of Tsuzuki's face – nose, eyebrow, cheek, lips, jaw – suddenly turned violent. Grabbing a fistful of hair Muraki pulled Tsuzuki up and began shaking the lolling head.

"But everyone just kept dying! No matter how much I studied, how much I practiced, how much experience I gained, people continued to die right in front of me. Eventually it felt like I was fighting _death itself_ and at some point it had somehow become personal." Muraki's free hand had moved to grip Tsuzuki's chin, now cradling the head close to his own in order to frantically whisper at the blank face.

"And so I began to study my adversary. Coax it out and then push it back. I started small. Lab mice, rats – small lives, small deaths – but soon it wasn't enough. I had to use larger specimens, had to keep trying anything and everything in order to overcome death. I started to do my experiments in the middle of surgeries, cutting and cauterizing, and for a long time no one noticed. When they finally did, finally saw the irregular infections and slow deaths my patients always succumbed to after my operations, they rejected me. 'Mad Muraki' they called me." He gave a harsh bark of incredulous laughter, silencing himself just as quickly and trailing off to a whisper once again.

"But I wasn't mad, no, I knew _exactly_ what I was doing, perfectly aware of the ramification. I was just _numb _is all, I'd lost myself. My gyroscope was gone and I didn't know up from down, good from bad, life from death..."

Muraki sat quietly for a moment with the admission, processing the words as if it were the first time he had spoken them aloud, the first time he had admitted such guilt, such _vulnerability_. Even if his only audience was the severed head of his brother and a vegetable, Muraki still felt a chill of shock as the realization continued to wreath around his neck, tightening his throat in some semblance of residual emotion.

The visceral response interested him. It had been a long time since he felt such physical reactions stemming from emotion. After so many self-surgeries and extreme body modification he had began to think that his nerves were numbed out. Or perhaps it was just apathy… It took a stimulating subject to rouse even the smallest reactions in him. He continued to self-monitor in the back of his mind and plowed on, determined to associate until the long-dormant emotions ran their course.

"I despised everyone – the patients, their families, the other doctors, but most of all, I hated myself. Each surgery was an act of the purest self-hatred. Truthfully, my sympathies were rarely with my patients, or rather, with my victims. I was mostly afraid. _Terrified. _My own cowardly brand of mortality; I was lamenting in advance my own pitiful demise. And after the over-dosed medication, after the failed operations, after the unavoidable deaths, there was also anger – black, fierce, hurting anger – the kind that I wanted to take out on whatever presented itself."

Muraki smiled at Tsuzuki with a knowing look.

"I know you're in on it too, you know that same sick joke just as well as I do, Tsuzuki. Because in the end, it's that black rage that becomes the constant, a modus operandi, a serial emotion that will eventually take _serial _action." He gave a slight smile at the weak pun.

"This emotion doesn't justify what we did, what I continue to do. Justifications are empty and outrageous and the dead stay dead no matter how you might try to change that, Tsuzuki. Rather, it's to say that I more or less understand what happened when my grandfather found you those eighty years ago, how it happened; I know the wickedness that soaks into your blood and perverts all of your good intentions, how such an obsession can heat up and start to sizzle. I know the boil that precedes butchery."

Muraki had peeled back the thin yukata by this point, nuzzling Tsuzuki's collar bone and spreading his long fingers across the pale flesh.

"I wonder... did my grandfather ever hold you like this? Did he run his fingers over your body? Did he touch you and stroke your hair like so? His notes mentioned your moments of clarity and how they slipped away faster and faster as time went on. He wrote it down as your spiral into madness, but I think it was just your way of hiding. From your past... And from your present too, I suspect."

Muraki's roving hands found Tsuzuki's wrist and stroked the runneled scars knowingly, as if the marks of mutilation held a tightly locked secret that he could only read through his fingertips. It wasn't hard to guess, though his grandfather's notes were always professional, it would take an idiot to not to read between the lines.

And Muraki was no idiot.

"My grandfather's unwanted passions were the only thing waiting for you when you woke up. So of course you would want to stay asleep forever, since you weren't allowed to be granted that final slumber. I wonder if he violated you even then, plucking your unresponsive body. I wonder if he cut you, this fascinating body that does not die... Did he wait between each abuse so he could have a fresh canvas or was he so impatient that he layered the wounds upon each other until you were no longer visible beneath them? You could answer these questions, Tsuzuki; I know you remember, though you would rather not. You could tell me exactly how he hurt you, how he probed you, how he peeled back your layers in an attempt to explain what makes you tick. But you won't tell me; you won't admit to what is dead and gone, as if the past will stay buried if you ignore it long enough. So instead of asking your mind, locked away in silence, I will just ask your body. Starting now, I will reap the truth of what my grandfather sowed in you by following his footsteps; and even if he never did these things... I still want to see all of you."

Beneath the thin yukata, Muraki found more scars intersecting over Tsuzuki's chest. It was a memorable pattern, the scar tissue from previous surgeries were far too familiar to not notice.

"Just how old are these Tsuzuki? I can recognize my grandfather's handiwork; seems he worked you over quite nicely." Idly, without lifting his head from the collarbone he was now lathing with bites and licks, Muraki plucked a scalpel from the nearby tray. Bringing it forward he laid it over the kiss swollen flesh and applied a steady pressure until red seeped up. He slowly dragged the blade across listening to the scrape of metal on bone as the white was revealed for a second only to be sealed back up in a healing stitch just as quickly. Muraki gazed ravenously at the flawless skin left in the wake of the scalpel – not even the red from his bites remained. He looked down at the scars with a new appreciation.

"He must have opened you up countless times to have left these marks…" Lapping up the residual blood from the blade he murmured "Looks like I have some catching up to do…"

Muraki was almost on the table at this point, leaning over Tsuzuki's prone body, stroking every inch of skin, even going so far as to press a kiss on unresponsive lips and slip his hand beneath the yukata to grope and appraise in such an uninhibited and forward manner, had Tsuzuki been awake the room would have been filled with summons. As it was he laid limp, catatonic, his eyes glazed and open, breath calm and shallow. Muraki slipped back, a small sardonic smile tugging at his lips, and began to gather equipment tossing them nonchalantly onto the operating tray as he rummaged through his 'study'.

"Ready to start Tsuzuki?" He asked pleasantly, not expecting a reply. He stripped Tsuzuki in a brisk business-like manner, the shadowy erotic half-exposed tease of the yukata was lost under the harsh overhead surgery lights. Muraki looked down, as if just remembering, between Tsuzuki's fully exposed legs. He noted the sudden dryness in his mouth and the slightly quickened pulse with small interest as he plucked at Tsuzuki's limp cock, hefting the weight of it appreciatively in his hand. He tsked at himself, dropping the flesh back down and pinning back his own arousal.

"It's a shame you can't get hard like this Tsuzuki. Though I am sure we can think of a more creative solution." Muraki murmured pulling at the loose skin, imagining it taut and glistening with desperate precome, straining against the medical tubing wrapped snuggly around the base of his girth, Tsuzuki's whimpers as the impending orgasm was held off so long it _hurt_...

Muraki gave a soft shake of his head, impressed with his own rippling imagination. One thought sent his mind reeling down perverted paths before he could stop the motion. It was remarkable how much Tsuzuki's mere presence affected him.

"Soon enough my dear, soon enough. For now, let's just follow in my grandfather's footsteps, ne?" Muraki hummed along, as if his thoughts were Tsuzuki's responses that he had to demurely deny. He gave Tsuzuki's cheek one last stroke before turning around to drag the operating tray closer, sharp tools rattling on the table with an eager metallic snapping.

"Now normally there would be a long tedious sterilization process, but if your immune system is anywhere near as aggressive as your healing response, I am sure we have nothing to worry about… Look, I'm not even wearing gloves." Muraki turned back around and spread his pale hands out in front of him, as if to show Tsuzuki his honesty.

"We'll both feel _everything._" Muraki whispered, picking up the scalpel again.

He ghosted his free hand over Tsuzuki's chest once more, admiring the blank canvas before he placed his mark, tracing the firm lines of muscle, fingering his nipples until they hardened and blushed. Finally he brought the blade down with a practiced finesse, laying the first cut precisely over a tell tale scar beneath Tsuzuki's left nipple, dragging the scalpel diagonally across his chest until it reached the central sternum. He lifted the blade and drew an identical line from the right side, the two cuts meeting in an arrow before being dragged straight down through the middle and sinking into the abdominal cavity, stopping just above the navel.

Blood had already begun to flow, creating a red cat's cradle of tangled lines down Tsuzuki's sides and pooling in the dip of his chest. Muraki stared appreciatively as the cuts abruptly began to heal themselves, pulling the blood back in, a strange reverse wound sewing itself closed with the efficiency of an immortal body. Before the incisions could completely seal over Muraki stabbed the scalpel into the center line, keeping the breach open. He grabbed a pair of surgical clamps and laid them within arm's reach before digging his fingers into the fast fading line, squirming and pressing and forcing with enough pressure to breach the barely healed skin.

Once beneath the surface Muraki spread his fingers, feeling the wet bloody warmth of Tsuzuki's insides and the tingle of healing power as the skin attempted to pull itself back together even around the encroaching digits. He held them there for a moment, savoring the feeble automated attempts at healing, the strain of a shinigami's body responding unconsciously to trauma. Muraki stoically teased himself with the pleasurable sensation of the pitiful survival mechanism as long as he could before finally breaking down and allowing his face to snap into a manic smile.

"Lovely response Tsuzuki, I'm impressed with your flesh that just refuses to succumb. Just think how many times I will be able to rip Saki open with this body... Let's try it out shall we?" Muraki shoved his fingers in deeper, all the way in to the last knuckle before hooking them to the sides and ripping them violently apart with his inhuman strength. The skin was still weakened by the scoring left by the scalpel and split wide open in a brilliant vision of red. The sudden torrent of blood that immediately gushed up still somehow neatly followed Muraki's guides, dripping down the triangular flaps of skin, pattering softly to the ground in a fast spreading puddle.

Tsuzuki did not react, indifferent to the wrenching violence being inflicted upon his body; not even an anesthetic-free vivisection could wake him from the darkness. Muraki simply grinned, a feral smile that more resembled a grimace as his hands continued to press deeper into the abdominal cavity, pulling and tearing the skin back just so he could see more.

Setting the clamps up properly took longer than Muraki thought it would. Since he hadn't bothered to use any coagulation gels the abdominal cavity continued to flood over with blood, making Tsuzuki's flesh very slippery; the moment Muraki pulled one flap of skin back, another had just sewn itself back in place before he could get the clamp around it. He laughed cruelly, enjoying the game far too much. His hands were stained red up to the elbow and the smell of shinigami blood, heavy and metallic in the air, was richly intoxicating. He licked his lips, picking up a few stray droplets of the spray before finally succeeding in tethering the skin back, first on one side, then the other. Without the constant struggle of tenacious healing Muraki stilled as he drank in the sight of Tsuzuki's insides.

His torso was split and spread open in a capital Y shape, pinned down and back, creating the illusion of eviscerated butterfly wings. Ropes of intestines glistened in the light, floating in the pooled cavity like blood rubies in a velvet box. The wet slippery texture beckoned to Muraki like the red haze of a brothel lamp and he scooped a coil up, relishing the thin pop of membrane as the length was pulled out of place. He squeezed it between his fingers, pressing his nails into the soft oily tissue until it silently ruptured.

He glanced up at Tsuzuki's face almost expecting to see a familiar visage of slack-jawed shock and suffering, strangled into a silent scream; but the shinigami was still unmoved. Though, Tsuzuki _had_ paled considerably, the blood loss making his face ashen, it still wasn't the same visceral reaction Muraki wanted. The lack of response made Muraki feel rebellious, going against his meticulous professional manner.

Even with his victims, disemboweling was treated as business. Only the most beautiful and sublime souls moved him to act upon them as more than mere tools. The rape of Tsuzuki's current partner for instance. The delicate prepubescent bloom – tainted with loneliness and abuse yet still somehow so sickeningly innocent; Muraki couldn't help but pluck that bud and savor it between his teeth. And now Tsuzuki was in a similar state. Lying exposed in front of him with a dead expression of catatonic despair while his guts were boiling with spilled vitality between Muraki's fingers…

The juxtaposed sight made him let loose.

Muraki pressed his hands deeply into Tsuzuki's body, all the way up to his forearms, and panted as he didn't even attempt to hold back his demented arousal.

"This heat, this vital scorching heat, will provide the spark for my dearly departed brother. This body that doesn't age and doesn't die will be the vehicle for my revenge. I have to chase your spirit away, crush your mind into dust, so that my brother will have room to grow inside you. So keep hiding Tsuzuki, stay enshrouded in your subconscious defense mechanism. I will make this life so unbearable for you that you never come back. I will outdo my grandfather and make certain you stay asleep forever." Muraki snarled the speech, increasing in volume and tempo until he was nearly roaring with mad delight.

Muraki began pulling yards of intestines out, yanking harshly when they caught. He first just indiscriminately threw them aside to grab more but eventually he began to loop and heap them about Tsuzuki's neck, layering them onto him like a gaudy necklace. He cupped his hands in the red broth and smeared bloody fingers over Tsuzuki's face leaving trails and drips, eventually even pushing his fingers into Tsuzuki's slack mouth, feeling the smooth wetness, and enjoying the forced erotic display of Tsuzuki eating his own guts.

Muraki's pants were tight and uncomfortable, chaffing against his sensitized cock. The bloodlust was past the point of no return and he couldn't stop a groan at the loss of contact as he pulled his arms back out to quickly work off his pants. With only his lab jacket on, Muraki gave a breathy gasp as he gripped his full erection with hands still dripping with warm blood, the tip of his cock already honeyed with precome and mixing freely with the red.

The pungent blood scent seemed to fill the air with a mouth-watering mist – shinigami blood was far more concentrated, pure, and potent; Muraki felt a surreal helplessness as he was pulled along by it. What had started out as an exploratory procedure mapping the limits of Tsuzuki's healing abilities was quickly degenerating into a sexual feeding frenzy as he clambered onto the operating table straddling the ripped open body. There was no stopping it now and Muraki dropped all pretense of research.

"Which would you rather fuck first, Tsuzuki? Me, or the knife?" He howled with laughter as the professional angelic guise slipped further down the more stained he became. With one hand he rummaged through Tsuzuki's guts, dislodging yet more coils of never-ending intestines, pressing his fingers in and rupturing the delicate liver, tugging nonchalantly at the hard-packed kidneys before finally wrapping his hand fully around one and ripping back with a surge of maniacal strength. Tsuzuki's body bucked beneath him, being dragged along with the kidney before the organic moorings finally snapped and he fell back to the table with a dull thump. Muraki squeezed the ruined organ in his hands, watching the various fluids seep out, trying to hold himself back but failing miserably; he quivered helplessly as he licked the bloodied specimen.

While Muraki continued to violate Tsuzuki's insides with one hand his other slipped down to retrieve the scalpel, shoving the thin blade into Tsuzuki's ass without ceremony. Distractedly he dropped the kidney and lifted one of Tsuzuki's legs, hooked the knee over his shoulder to get a better angle. Muraki thrust the scalpel in deeply, all the way past the rubber grip, and even then he forced a couple of fingers on top of the handle through the sliced and bleeding opening. He began to give short rapid thrusts, no doubt slicing Tsuzuki's insides to ribbons as his own hips jerked to mirror the movement. The strewn intestines and guts continued to ooze sluggishly, slowed by the tenacious healing powers. Steam rose from the exposed innards, juxtaposed brilliantly against the frigid air.

Muraki couldn't hold back any longer, his heady arousal was already over-ripe and it was with a relieved sigh that he plunged into Tsuzuki's tattered and bloody entrance after tossing the scalpel away. Wet gushing heat surrounded him, slick with blood but still retaining its pleasure as it tightened in a healing vice around him.

"Ah, Tsuzuki, exquisite…" He breathed, dropping the angelic mask completely as he began to thrust animalistically into the unresponsive body.

They were both completely covered in blood, not even an inch of the pure white fabric remained to hide Muraki's true nature. Muraki turned his head to bite the leg still propped over his shoulder, shuddering with pleasure as he tasted the metallic bloom of blood on his tongue. Shinigami blood affected him more strongly, almost at an aphrodisiacal level, drawing out the beast in him until even Muraki was being helplessly strung along by his voracious bloodlust. His silver eyes glazed over losing focus on everything except the oozing pleasure he was drawing out from Tsuzuki's body, suckling his blood and penetrating him at the same time.

The pleasant buzz was starting to burn, encircling his hips with a potent numbness as his senses were overwhelmed by the shinigami surrounding him. Muraki slowed his movements to lessen the effect, but still insatiably driven, he instead plunged his hands inside Tsuzuki once again, fishing lower down through the bowels until he could feel his own hardness through the smooth and obviously fragile membranes. Slowly he pumped himself, the thrusts becoming pulses as his hands bobbed rhythmically within Tsuzuki. He closed his eyes, gasping audibly, wantonly, humping the burning bleeding mess of a man. In the background he could hear the steady bubbling of Saki's tank, the scene lit by the eerie green electric glow of the decapitated voyeur.

Muraki was teetering on the edge of his own oblivion when a sudden new sound broke through his trance. A strangled mewling, as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing, awakening from one nightmare to be splayed out in another. Muraki looked up and was caught in the horrified gaze of Tsuzuki's shockingly purple eyes.

Muraki shuddered as he was broadsided by an explosive orgasm.

He had been unprepared for the arresting eyes or the implications of Tsuzuki's consciousness and the sudden electric color amongst all the stark reds and ashen whites has been enough of a jolt to shove his deranged libido over the edge. As Muraki's vision refocused he drank in the sight of Tsuzuki's conscious face.

The shinigami's visage was widened with shock, face drained of blood and expression, making the parts of him not smeared with red frighteningly pale. He gave a small cough, as if trying to wake himself up, and Muraki could see the movement in the bottom of his exposed lungs. Tsuzuki could not even lift his arms with all the blood loss, probably couldn't even feel the pain with his shocked yet surprisingly composed reaction. He didn't thrash or scream or do anything that might have whipped Muraki back up into a frenzy. Rather his head sank down; purple slowly lost into white as his eye began to roll back, sinking under once again…

Muraki couldn't bear to lose such a rare opportunity and lunged forward grabbing Tsuzuki's stomach in a shaking fist and pulling hard while simultaneously redoubling the speed and strength of his thrusts with his cock that hadn't flagged an inch even after his first release. Tsuzuki's eyes shot open again at the sudden assault, Muraki's grinning face looming before him.

"Lovely Tsuzuki, this pain is all you have to look forward to in this life… Won't you just stay in the darkness?" Muraki finished the question with a kiss, pressing his bloody lips onto Tsuzuki's and smearing them together, wringing out a deranged passion from his victim. He bit down hard feeling his teeth almost connect through the flesh as his frenzied thrusts met their peak. He spilled over violently a second time, shooting his seed deep into the shredded body in several pulsing spurts.

When Muraki finally came down Tsuzuki was gone again, pulled back under his self-imposed coma. Muraki pulled out languidly, suddenly exhausted yet more sated than he had felt in years. He couldn't even remember the last time he had let go so completely. He slowly began to pull off the surgical clamps watching as the skin automatically pulled itself together slowly, hindered by the trailing intestines still steaming in the open air. Muraki clipped the exposed coils efficiently with pliers, folding the rest back inside the body cavity to heal and reconnect from within.

"Perhaps we were beginning to reach the limits of your abilities." He mused idly, noting the obviously slower healing response.

Tracking blood wherever he went, Muraki began to rummage through the cabinets again, fetching an IV and feeder drip bag brimming with a dark viscous substance.

"This is just a special mix of proteins, minerals, and amino acids to help you regrow your organs." He eyed the flung kidney dispassionately making the mental note to take some samples from it later, "I'm sure your healing abilities could take care of everything eventually, but it would be a lot faster if I helped with some of the raw materials."

Muraki gazed smugly around the room; unreal amounts of blood pooled on the floor, even the walls and ceiling were splattered with the substance. Grinning at the mess he made, Muraki slowly turned to look at Saki floating in his tank, the silent passionless witness to his psychosis.

"You're next, dearest brother…"

**AN: **In Vivo is a medical term usually in reference to animal experimentation that uses a whole live specimen (typically ending in vivisection DX). I also saw a music album titled In Vivo which described it as the fantasy of having your lover caress your organs in an act of romance (had wicked cool art too!) I like to think the title in reference to this fic is some strange combination of those two ideas.

The canon kicks in from here on out and Tsuzuki gets rescued and suicidal and then receives the healing hug of love from Hisoka… (d'aw) I just find it hard to believe that Muraki wouldn't do anything _unsavory_ in the time between, especially since Tsuzuki was practically comatose and defenseless…

Eh… It's more likely I'm just a freaky fruit salad. X3


End file.
